The Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation (AusHSI) and the Queensland Behavioural Economics Group (QuBE) Queensland University of Technology invites you to celebrate the launch of Andrew Leigh MP’s book Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World.

Across medicine, business and government, there’s no simpler or more powerful tool for finding out what works than a randomised experiment. Investigating everything from jails to ad campaigns, philanthropy to schools, the randomistas are building evidence and busting myths.

Randomised tests are carried out on us every day: by supermarkets, search engines, online dating sites and direct marketers. Political parties use randomised trials to win elections. But how do these tests work? Are there any ethical issues? And what do they reveal about our choices?

In Randomistas, Andrew Leigh tells the stories of radical researchers who overturned conventional wisdom in medicine, politics, economics, law enforcement and more. From finding the cure to scurvy to discovering what policies really improve literacy rates, randomistas have shaped life as we know it – but they often had to fight to conduct their trials and have their findings implemented.

About the Author:

Andrew Leigh is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Federal Member for Fenner in the ACT. Prior to being elected in 2010, Andrew was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in public policy from Harvard, having graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in Law and Arts. Andrew is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and a past recipient of the ‘Young Economist Award’, a prize given every two years by the Economics Society of Australia to the best Australian economist under 40.